Definition
An obsolete English legal term for a residual offense of deceit — any act done fraudulently or dishonestly, whether arising out of a contractual relationship or not, that could not be captured by a more specific legal name. Cosening functioned as a catch-all category in early English law for conduct that was plainly wrongful and deceptive but that fell outside the recognized forms of action for fraud, forgery, or other named offenses. The concept closely paralleled the Roman civil law category of stellionatus, which similarly served as a residual offense for fraud not otherwise classified.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Obsolete form of "cozening," meaning cheating or defrauding.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Anything done deceitfully, and which could not be properly designated by any special name, whether belonging to contracts or not."
The common and legal uses of this term are unusually close — Webster's 1913 definition is drawn directly from Burrill's legal dictionary, reflecting a period when legal and general vocabulary were not sharply separated. Researchers should note, however, that the ordinary word "cozening" (to cozen: to cheat or deceive) had broader informal usage and did not carry the specific residual legal function that the term held in English law. The legal category of cosening was a formal, if loosely defined, offense with procedural significance; the common word was simply a synonym for cheating.
Common Confusion
Cosening is frequently encountered in close proximity to cosinage (also spelled cosenage or cousinage) in old legal dictionaries, including Bouvier's, where the two entries appear consecutively. These are entirely unrelated terms. Cosinage is a common-law writ used to recover possession of land after an abatement, grounded in a plaintiff's relationship to a deceased ancestor. Cosening is an offense of deceit. The orthographic similarity and the dictionary adjacency of these terms have caused them to be confused or conflated in historical transcription and research. When reading manuscript or early printed sources, verify which term is actually intended.
Why It Matters in Research
Cosening is primarily a term of historical legal significance. Researchers will encounter it in early English criminal law sources, indictment forms, and treatises on pleading — particularly West's Symboleography and Blackstone's Commentaries (Book IV). It will not appear in modern statutory codes or contemporary case law in any operative sense.
Several research traps are worth flagging. First, the term is a spelling variant: historical sources render it as cosening, cosenage (when used as a noun form of the offense), cozening, or cozenage. Searching a single spelling in a full-text corpus will miss variants. Second, because cosening was a residual category — defined by what it was not — it rarely generated the kind of doctrinal development that produces a trail of cases. Its primary appearance is in treatises and form books on criminal indictments, not in reported decisions. Third, the comparison to stellionatus is analytically useful: researchers tracing the concept of residual fraud offenses across legal traditions should follow the stellionatus thread into civil law sources, where the concept is more fully developed.
For researchers using the Law Mind corpus, cosening connects forward to the development of common law fraud and deceit as actionable wrongs, and backward to the civilian tradition of stellionatus. It also sits adjacent to discussions of forgery and false pretenses in early criminal law treatises, as those named offenses were partly defined by what they excluded — leaving the residue to cosening.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries are in strong agreement on this term, which is unsurprising given that the definition appears to derive from a single authoritative source — Cowell's legal dictionary — and was transmitted through West's Symboleography into the standard reference tradition. Black's (both editions), Bouvier's, Rapalje & Lawrence, and Burrill's all define cosening in substantially identical terms: a catch-all offense of deceit not reducible to a more specific legal category, equivalent to the civil law's stellionatus.
Bouvier adds the citation to Blackstone's Commentaries (4 Bl. Com. 158), which is the most accessible primary source for the modern researcher. Rapalje & Lawrence attributes the definition to Jacob's Law Dictionary, revealing another link in the transmission chain. None of the historical dictionaries provide meaningful doctrinal development beyond the core definition, which itself signals the marginal status of cosening as a practical legal category — it was a conceptual placeholder more than an actively litigated offense.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss is any discussion of how cosening related to the emerging law of fraud and deceit in equity or to the action of deceit at common law. A researcher relying solely on these entries would not understand cosening's place in the broader development of fraud doctrine.
Jurisdictional Note
Cosening is a term of old English law with no recognized counterpart in American statutory or common law. It does not appear as an operative legal category in any American jurisdiction. Its relevance to American legal research is historical and comparative only.